


used up words

by sharkfish



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Content note: Brief discussion of suicidal ideation, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Love Letters, M/M, POV Second Person, Poet Castiel, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2015-04-29
Packaged: 2018-03-26 07:05:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3841630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkfish/pseuds/sharkfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You, my ecstasy. You, the only savior I’d ever need, just a man – a righteous man, certainly, but still of this mortal plane, a man of skin and muscle and heartbeat and cold feet and a sneeze that made me burst into laughter every single time. You, the one God’s morning stars fell for; who called me ‘angel’ even when people were listening:</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>I would give anything. Let me go into the horizon an illiterate pauper. Let me trade my own life, let me trade the fate of the whole world, for just five minutes of your time. One minute, even. Just one more where I know you can hear me, where I can chant love love love love as many times as I can before the buzzer goes off, so at least I know you fall asleep warm.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>My darling gardener, I don’t know if I can do it without you.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	used up words

We met at one of those stupid parties Gabe is always having, back when he was in a shitty apartment with no furniture and still able to trick me into social situations. I tried to beg off almost as soon as I got in the door, but Gabe shoved me towards a corner full of pillows and blankets and people and ducked away the way only particularly short assholes can.

You are -- were -- golden. All those poems I’ve written about you, a sleeping lion, danger under your skin; still, you were magnetic. And when you looked up as I approached, you stopped in the middle of a sentence and your grin faltered. That breathless flutter started in my chest and went towards my head and it was getting a little -- I think you said, “Hey, man. Take a seat,” and instead of panicking, I was the most awkward person on the planet as I settled myself on the floor. God, you’re so lucky to never have been spindly as an adolescent.

You smiled, easy, and thinking about it now, everyone else around had already realized you were checked out of the larger conversation. I was a lamb between your paws, trapped.

I held out my hand. “I’m Castiel Novak,” I said, “the host’s brother.”

You looked at my hand long enough for my face to get hot, and then you shook, warm, your palm like hard work at sunrise. “Winchester,” you said, and then, “Dean.”

I know that you hadn’t told anyone in Austin your first name until then. I didn’t ever mention it because I knew you’d be embarrassed, but that was a boon to me. That _is_ a boon to me. I was the first to know you.

I think I shook your hand too long, and then you broke away with some stupid small talk question and I think I even acted a bit like a person when I answered. I watched your fingers as you rolled a joint, quick in practice but precise like a ritual -- you used to do this party trick where you would seal it off by burning the excess paper down the length of the of the roll in a surprising rush of flame. “Impressive,” I said.

“Oh. Uh.” You were embarrassed. “No one likes a goopy roach.”

You held a perfect joint out to me along with a lighter and I got it started, taking entirely too big of a hit and covering up my watering eyes with, _“Goopy?”_

You hit harder than I did and it was nothing to you, but you also smoked slow, thoughtfully, cataloging. By the time I was taking another hit, goopy was a thousand years ago. “This is a brand new strain,” you said. “Just got it in from the grower to do a little market testing.”

Your smile was so huge. I wondered how often you saw a dentist to have teeth that white. Not particularly straight -- no braces for the Winchesters -- but I liked you even more for that rebellious tooth on the bottom, wanted to run my tongue over the country fence of it.

I was already melting into the cushions, against you a little, losing track of the shitty music and my shitty brother and all the shitty strangers. “That’s,” I said, “really good weed.”

Your laugh boomed in my chest like a heartbeat. That’s how I remember it, at least: all-consuming. “Yeah, Cas. I know.”

It finally clicked. I realized I’d heard Gabe mention the Winchester Special before. “Oh,” I said, “you’re here doing business?”

We were closer, breathing each other’s air, breathing each other’s smoke. “Look like I’m making money, darlin’?” You were smiling and even I knew you were flirting. You talked Texas and all its slowly snipped gerunds, sounds I’d never before associated with anything but republicans, the redneck variety, but from you it was so thick and sweet I could drown like a fly in honey.

Sometime around dawn, you arranged the now-empty blankets and pillows into a little nest around us. You kissed my forehead and crawled behind me and pressed up against my back. I was stoned out of my mind (and there had been shots, I remembered vaguely), but I still heard the hesitation. “Can I…?”

Me, elegantly and not at all like animalistic grunting: “Mmhmm.”

We slept all morning, your arm around me, hand tucked warmly (chastely) underneath my shirt at my navel, your slow breathing against my neck. All of our clothes on, my jeans scratchy against my legs. You didn’t even try to kiss me.

I loved you for that the moment I was conscious. You murmured “mornin’” in a sleep-molasses voice and I rolled on my back and turned my head and we were nose to nose on the pillow, the sunlight showing off the spring in your eyes.

“Sleep ok?” you said, and for a quick moment I hated you for being so blasé about cuddling with a stranger all night. (Were we still strangers if we had talked for something like eight hours straight and you could name all my siblings and psychotropic medications?) Right then, I wanted you all to myself. There are things that never change.

Something showed on my face because you pulled back, warm touch retreating. “Cas, I’m sorry if -- fuck, I was too forward, I don’t even know if you’re--”

“I am,” I said. There was a long pause before I realized I had to say more than that. “I enjoyed spending the night with you.”

You laughed, flinging yourself onto your back next to me, your hand going immediately to mine. “Jesus, Cas. I thought Charlie’s shit had gone hallucinogenic.”

Your sister, Charlie, the “genius botanist” side of the family business.

From Gabe’s room, a pillow flying into the hallway and his hangover voice yelling, “Shut the fuck up!”

You yelled back, “We’re not even being loud, dickhead!”

Gabe’s door slammed. We giggled. You were fucking gorgeous. You were better than all the poems I’d ever loved. You _were_ a type of poem. That afternoon, I wrote a love poem that later became "Your Holy Mouth," the book that won all those stupid awards.

Sometimes I wonder -- we didn’t keep secrets from each other, not at all, but there’s so many things I never told you just because I thought I had time.

Like the reason why I never stopped writing using the language of the divine. Though my father preached a loving and joyful God, I only found comfort in the ecstasy of the religiously insane, the Monks counting and copying the word of God over and over in tiny, uneven handwriting by the light of a single-wick candle; the ones who saw the blood of Christ and did not recoil. Instead, they brought it to their lips in celebration of redemption. They never forgot that their God was a jealous God, that piety meant giving back their own blood, delivering punishment on themselves like a dog cowering and covering itself in piss beneath a raised hand.

Yes, I know you think I make Jesus Stuff sound much more interesting than it actually is.

And I know how it wounded you when one of your easy jokes was met with blank stares at all those fucking ceremonies and conferences and black tie cocktail parties I dragged you to. I thought I had a responsibility to… who? My publisher? The poetry itself, like it existed more outside of me, it’s own creature of gums and scales, and less like the parasitic twin I see it as now?

All those chips in the trust you had in me. All those times you thought the flagellation was punishment for choices that had been made for both of us, by our parents, long before I picked up a pen -- Charlie said she couldn’t ever convince you that you were smart enough for me and

I’m _so fucking angry_ at you for that. I loved you with every charged ion in my body from the moment you didn’t kiss me but asked to hold me instead and if there’s anything crueler than being without you, it’s never knowing that I needed to repackage my words in the tongue of lion for you to understand.

You, my ecstasy. You, the only savior I’d ever need, just a man -- a righteous man, certainly, but still of this mortal plane, a man of skin and muscle and heartbeat and cold feet and a sneeze that made me burst into laughter every single time. You, the one God’s morning stars fell for; who called me ‘angel’ even when people were listening:

I would give _anything_. Let me go into the horizon an illiterate pauper. Let me trade my own life, let me trade the fate of the whole world, for just five minutes of your time. One minute, even. Just one more where I know you can hear me, where I can chant _love love love love_ as many times as I can before the buzzer goes off, so at least I know you fall asleep warm.

My darling gardener, I don’t know if I can do it without you.

You made me promise I would tell you the first millisecond I had any thoughts like that. Like the weight of the world was too heavy for me to bear. “Is there a trillisecond? Is that a thing? Angel.” Our foreheads pressed together, sharing breath, sharing pulse. “Angel, please.”

That was the first time I heard you sound scared, so I promised. And you kissed me hard, and again, and you were strong enough for the both of us.

I’m telling you now: there are too many weapons I could use against myself in this house.

I don’t actually think you’re listening. Let the record remain clear that nothing I could identify as a deity has been proven to exist or revealed itself to me, Rev Novak’s prison sermons be damned. It turns out there are atheists in foxholes after all.

It’s just. Who else do I talk to?

What if I forget you?

 

You loved that fucking car. I didn’t cry when they showed me a picture of that stupid tattoo you and Charlie got when Texas legalized, and I spoke clearer than I ever have when I identified it as a piece of you. As what was left of you. There was not much else, they said.

I don’t think the cops ever got over their initial shock that _Cas Winchester, Spouse_ wasn’t the hysterical wife of a drug kingpin but just whatever husk was leftover when you took the soul out of a man, a void in a khaki jacket.

But when they mailed me pictures of the Impala for the insurance claim -- maybe part of me believed there were a million stupid weed tattoos in the world and you were going to stumble back in the door, singing under your breath and trying to play air guitar while juggling groceries, no matter what the cops said. That car, though, you told me a million times: she’s one of a kind. I may have been your angel, but she was your _baby_ , and I knew her as something built by your own hands, so it meant something to see her to see her opened up on the side of a two-lane highway.

Her steel frame was crumpled in like a broken heart. Like my broken heart. It hardly seemed like there was much left of her, like the parts had made up something so much larger than themselves, but the dangling rear view mirror still had that pentagram necklace from Charlie draped around it. It was a demon trap, symbol of protection, and you touched it each time you got behind the wheel for luck. “Babygirl can’t be restrained by speed limits,” you said, “but I’ve never been in an accident and remain ticket-free in the great state of Texas.”

Never.

Until.

 

In the 36 hours it took for you to finally text me after I wrote “Love Poem,” I had fully and completely convinced myself that my penchant for anxious depression had transformed into a full-blown psychotic episode because -- in my head, I remembered talking through the night like a fucking teenager with a man named Dean Winchester, possibly the most radiant human being I had ever met, a man who thought I was more interesting than a crowded apartment filled with a grab-bag assortment of academics, stoners, artists, everyone’s in a band, no one’s from here, there’s always a story somewhere if you listen -- but it was _me_ he whispered to about how loud and clear the foothills were after finally escaping the flatland prison of Kansas.

Nothing like you had ever happened to me. I felt like an outcast even among circles that should have welcomed me; I was writing but I hadn’t found my voice yet and I still wasn’t completely bought in on the heat in Austin, but to me the Hill Country was as loud and clear as the snow-filled valley you’d lived in during your stay in Longmont, and possibility had been itching under my skin like wings wanting to burst through. I would never have been brave enough to approach someone like you on my own, never brave enough to be my own catalyst.

I was starting to spin into even more acrobatic paranoias when my phone buzzed from the desktop. I stared at it. A few seconds later, it buzzed with a second text. There were a lot of people it could be. Gabe, for example. But probably not. He was more fond of mid-night drunk, lengthy voicemails telling me how I was always his favorite sibling and, _yanno, why don’t we hang out more, man? Come on, man. We’re at (always garbled) and you should come out, ok, bro? I love you. I really fucking love you, man. I hope you know that. You’re so smart and going to do such great things and I’m so proud of you, dude, fuck, I’m drunk. I guess, uh… I had some questions about some gay stuff but we can talk about that -- uh, there are women here now -- we'll talk --_

Instead, a mid-afternoon text from an unknown number, area code 913. A Wyandotte County number, you had mentioned, though you blushed when you said it. It was a very long time before I could understand how much shame you felt for the way things were when you and Charlie were kids.

_cas!!! fuck i lost ur # temp---hpoe u didnt forget me yet_

_i want to make you dinner_

Letter by letter, I typed: “How could you lost my number when you put it in your phone?”

_i dont know how to use this thing_

I was trying to write a reply when the phone buzzed again. _im a grown man but i’ll_

I stared like I could will the end of the sentence to arrive. And then you were calling. I almost didn’t answer, my airways suddenly blocked by boulders, but you would know I was screening your call and for once in my life, I didn’t want to be that person. When I answered, you said, “Ok I can’t type this much but -- I’ll beg if I have to… other people aren’t like you, Cas. Please. I don’t want to be some guy you met at a party once.”

“Dean?” I said, stupidly.

Your side of the line was hushed for a long moment. “Oh,” you said, like you had swallowed the letters before realizing they were made of cactus. “I’m sorry. I thought we -- I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you --”

“You aren’t bothering me,” I said. And I was so wrapped up in my own insecurities and self-loathing that it didn’t even cross my mind that you could be looking for my approval. Around the chipped limestone in my throat, I managed, “I was hoping to hear from you.”

I stared at the blinking cursor on my laptop screen, knowing you were still there, just on the other side of a prayer. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I want to have dinner with you.”

You huffed a nearly-disbelieving, “Really?”

“Yes, really,” I said. And then: “Who is this again?”

I’d never been funny before. Making you laugh is one of my favorite addictions.

Was one of my favorite addictions, I mean.

I just need thirty seconds to say _love love love love love._

 

I was surprised at that house you were living in. It was the same one we first lived in together, when everything was about you surprising me. Was I always what you expected?

You answered the door wearing an apron. An apron covered in smiling little rainbows, Dean! Don’t deny it. That one that Charlie made you with all the crooked stitching. You always grumbled about it, but it was also the only one you wore until the seams ripped beyond my ability to repair. You liked things that came with a history, molded by hands and not robots.

“Cas,” you said, grinning. “You’re early. Come in, come in. I’m cooking so--” You veered towards the kitchen but I was already being drawn elsewhere.

You had books. We had talked a little about your love of Vonnegut and Franzen, but there were a bookshelf’s full of well-loved books here -- you had Margaret Atwood’s novels _and_ poetry (be still, my beating heart!), that final waterlogged version of _Leaves of Grass_ , enough Discworld paperbacks to include my favorite, a lovely hardback collection of the Harry Potter books with the original UK artwork.

“Don’t look at that,” you said. “You’re a real writer.”

I ran my fingers down the spine of a Pulitzer-winning non-fiction book I’d never gotten around to reading. “No such thing,” I said.

You have no idea how difficult it is, really, for me to turn away from a book, but I did it and met you in the kitchen. That was the house you had redone yourself, taking a sledgehammer to wall after wall until you felt less restricted. You started renovations right after your dad died, finished just before we met.

I haven’t even forgotten what you made us that night: perfectly grilled salmon with some of that fruit salsa you were always throwing together in the summer.

“Even if there were such thing as a ‘real writer,’” I said, trying not to talk with a mouthful of fish, “I’m not that.”

“Gabe said you’ve written books.”

Ghostwriting for an endless not-quite-romance series published by the company Anna was a senior editor at. It paid my bills and kept words coming out of my fingers, but it’s not like I was writing anything… “real.” It wasn’t like the toiling I had done over every single word in the first draft of “Love Poem,” changing linebreaks and then changing them back, rereading until everything was just right.

“Gabe talks a lot,” I said, and you grinned at me, our eyes catching for a moment that felt heavy like grace.

If we left handprints on each other, it was right then, both of us smiling, the late evening light coming through the windows.

 

The first time we kissed, you touched my face, tilting my chin upward to meet you. Kissing was not the kind of thing you did tentatively; it was soft and full and I loved the scratch of our cheeks rubbing together, loved the citrus taste of you.

Your tongue, your warmth, your hand in my hair, the weight of you. Even on the days when I’m afraid I’m forgetting your face, I can close my eyes and remember exactly the way you looked at me: full of wonder, like you’d never seen anything so bright before.

You say I pulled you out of the clutches of a hellhound but could never see me bowing my head at your feet, shedding the sterility of my previous life -- goddamn, Dean. I don’t know how you could just leave me here.

 

Anna had that amazing house party right after _Locked Rooms_ was published. You convinced Charlie to let you have an obscene amount of Supernatural despite it being on backorder; I think she felt bad she couldn’t be here. That’s one thing about the Winchesters: never met someone they don’t want to make part of the family.

You have such a crush on Anna. You spent the whole evening flirting, making her laugh, all that Winchester charm spilling out after too many rounds with her melodramatic bong and too many bottles of Shiner. And watching you from across the room, me mostly just being anti-social and voyeuristic in the corner, you a butterfly drying your wings in the warmth of adoring women, I had an epiphany. Something I had been walking towards the edge of, and now I found myself in a stiff disagreeance with gravity. I couldn't breathe and I couldn't stop smiling. 

At home -- your home, that is, though sometimes it was hard to remember -- we stumbled and giggled and kissed into the bedroom and we fucked slow and shuddery like one does after smoking too much Supernatural and as I was falling asleep, I thought that now, for certain, I knew that the Good Reverend was wrong: I wasn’t cursed. I was _blessed._

It’s not that I thought -- or think -- you were perfect or somehow outside the realm of regular mortal faults. Picking up your empty soda cans and beer bottles was never high on my list of things I wanted to do with my time, and yet I’ve done an awful lot of it. You went through that phase where you thought you didn’t need to wash your jeans because of something you saw on the internet; you only gave in after I sprayed the shit out of them with Lysol and you couldn’t stop sneezing. You weren’t registered to vote when we met. You had plenty of days where you exercised the emotional intelligence of a particularly stupid sea sponge, and there were years where you worked so much I hardly saw you, and you never did really understand my poetry.

One of the perks of being dead is that people always remember your best self, but I don’t want to forget any part of you. If I could make a deal with a demon, I would take even _only_ the worst parts of you. I’ll listen to your libertarian economics nonsense for as long as you want to tell me about it. I’ll let you keep Ayn Rand books in the house. I’ll never write another “impossible” poem again.

I spend a lot of time these days listening to “Reelin’ in the Years” on repeat. You must have sang it to me on our first road trip for it to stand out in my head -- it certainly wasn’t your favorite. (Though I guess that’s the point. I can’t listen to that one at all.) I just can’t get out from under it. I don't know how I never noticed how sad it was when you were still alive.

The morning after Anna’s party, I beat you awake but not by much. You nuzzled against my shoulder, groaned, found my hand under the covers. “Hey,” you said.

“Hey,” I said. After a minute: “Dean?”

“Mmm.”

“I love you.”

Even knowing how everything turned out, thinking about the way the air went still makes my eyes go black around the edges. I hadn’t realized it was a declaration until after I said it. I just loved you. It was so easy.

Here’s something I hate about you: you got out of bed. You mumbled something about taking a shower and left me there.

I had just assumed you loved me too. I was naive enough to, I guess, think that everything has to be an epic love story. This was the day when I found out that life is just about people doing the best they can without any direction from above, and mostly we fuck it all up.

I can’t remember exactly what bullshit you told me after your shower -- something work related, I’m sure, because this must’ve been during prohibition, the hours long and fraught with untold details so I couldn’t be implicated -- but I put dirty clothes on and we parted ways.

And you didn’t call me. Or text me or email me. You ignored whatever jokey text I sent you. When I thought maybe my phone was misbehaving again, I tried to call and got your voicemail more than once.

One of my secrets was that I completely lost my mind that week. You were the first person I was ever true to, and we had melded our lives together so completely that I was -- it was my soul that was ripped out of me, and instead I filled up with the black tar of desperate, desperate sadness. And violence. You never knew what it felt like to want to rip something out of yourself.

I was not sad. I was possessed, and I kept a blade next to my bed, stared at it for long, long hours every day. I hardly thought of you at all; just how badly I wanted to die.

Gabe showed up after a few days of radio silence. That short fuck dragged me out of bed and shoved me into a cold shower, clothes on, and played asylum nurse, checking under my tongue to make sure I had swallowed my pills like a good boy.

Do you want to know how selfish I am? Before then, I hadn’t ever thought about what it would do to them -- Gabe and Anna, that is -- if I offed myself. But there it was: one of them would find my body. One of them would choose a blazer and tie from my closet, have it dry-cleaned even if the tags were still on it from last time, deliver it to the funeral home for strangers to struggle the leftover shell of me into. Gabe and Anna would stand over my casket, surrounded by the piranhas that call themselves our family. That would be such an unforgivable cruelty after everything the three of us had survived.

 

When you finally called, it seemed like a hallucination. I was on a lot of drugs, making my way through the Purple Smith that Gabe had dropped off -- if you performed any miracle, it was this particular strain, which was far too heavy for real life but the perfect thing to distance me from suicidal ideation and into a type of purgatory where the monsters were hidden in clouds of smoke.

Like usual, I stared at the phone through too many rings. It was the last one before voicemail when I swiped green. “Cas,” you said, “are you busy tomorrow? Morning? I read about this hike --”

“Yes,” I said, as fast as my fogged brain could get to it.

“Oh,” you said. How could you doubt yourself? How could you not see that I belonged to you the moment I laid eyes on you, a golden god with black and white monsters inked up your left arm.

“I meant, yes, I’ll go,” I said. “You know I’m not busy.”

I could hear you smile big. “It’s an infinite universe,” you said, “anything could happen.”

We didn’t talk much in the car. It wasn’t any sort of hostility -- it’s just that you will never find me particularly chattery after a 4 a.m. wake-up. You were just contemplative, in that meditative state you get to sometimes when you’re driving, riding the curves like your fingerprints were in the tread of each tire. The windows were cracked, the trees rushing by at seventy miles an hour. It smelled like spring, like… anything could happen. Like the first day of Creation, before all that beautiful potential turned into rotted fruit.

I laughed when I saw the little brown sign as we pulled onto gravel. You took me, literally, to Purgatory -- or at least the Lower Purgatory Natural Area. It’s in San Marcos, so why it took so goddamn long to get there, I’m not entirely sure. Trying to gather your nerve?

It was still dark, just the barest hint of witch purple on the eastern horizon. We sat in the car at the trailhead and smoked, motor off, windows down, listening to the first mockingbird songs of the morning. There were rustlings in the brush and I hoped for an armadillo sighting.

We packed up (“saddled up,” you called it, because you always kind of wanted to be a cowboy). Eight miles, you said, which probably meant ten, because you were horrible at reading trail maps and we always ended up on some deer trail you swear is a shortcut. You were nervous, skittering all around while I bug sprayed, acting like there was some kind of hurry.

We could barely see the trail in front of us, which was kind of a problem on crags of Hill Country limestone. I was about to start cursing you way earlier than I usually do on a hike (I get cranky after too much exercise) when the trail opened up to a tree huge enough to belong in a fairy tale, an apartment complex for pixies.

We touched it, reverent in the gray light. “I’m going up,” you said, shrugging off your backpack with a heavy thump.

“What?!” You hopped up the first branch -- or maybe it was a root sweeping out of the ground like a wave -- and grabbed for the second. “Dean Winchester, you are too old to climb trees!”

Next branch, and you start cursing and shimmying back down at speed. That was the first real laugh I’d had since the last time we’d been together. “Fucking fire ants!” you said, flinging your hands to toss off the last remaining passenger.

“Welcome to Texas,” I said, and you glared at me like the little boy you were when you knew you had done something dumb.

We went onward in silence, bumping shoulders a couple of times before having to go single person on the trail. It was more than a mile to the next of nature’s gifts: an overlook, big rocks arranged like they were intended to be sat on to watch the sun come up, all these trees and prickly pears and wildflowers spread before us.

You did not sit on the same rock as me. It reminded me that you had ran off and left me with my demons the last time we’d seen each other. I couldn’t meet your eyes; I watched a doe and fawn step among the trees below us, ears flicking this way and that.

“Look at me, Cas,” you said.

Your eyes were a brilliant green that rivaled the new leaves around us. I thought of this bit of an Andrea Gibson poem: _The trees are naked and lonely/I try to tell them new leaves will come around in the spring/but you can’t tell trees these things/they’re like me, they just stand there and don’t listen…_

“I -- I fucked up. When you said -- I got really scared. Cas.” You closed your eyes, briefly, gathering fight. “I’m not good at talking about -- that stuff. And I didn’t realize -- I wanted to impress you so fucking bad when we met, and being with you was like the best trip anyone could have. I don’t know how I got you to look at me, much less…” You dug around in your backpack, under the extra water packs, and your hand came out closed into a fist. “And I just think I could -- that doesn’t matter.”

You went down on your good knee, silhouetted in the sunrise. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’m the luckiest bastard alive to have you.” You looked down at your hand, blushing. “Cas, will you -- will you marry me?”

God bless you, you were nervous to open your hand to the plain silver band inside, like I didn’t fall in line at your heel like a good pup, no matter what.

On the inside of the band: _32 ⅓_

I came so close to throwing it over the cliff, my hands starting to shake. “How did you…?”

“Cas,” you said, something shuddering underneath your composure.

I put it on as quickly as I could. “You are a stupid, stupid, wonderful man. I -- yes, yes. Christ, Dean.”

You started grinning and grabbed me and kissed me, long and slow and thorough enough that I thought I might have to remind you of the likelihood of getting fire ants in unpleasant places if we started rolling around naked, but then you pulled away -- barely, foreheads pressed together, your eyelashes a mile long and tangling with mine. And you were crying. Not sobbing, but there were definitely tears, and you weren’t even ashamed of it, and then you said, “God, I love you, Cas,” and I hope that’s the last thing I remember before I die.

It was blisteringly hot by the time we got back to the car, but for once I didn’t mutter poxes on you the last mile. I kept twisting the ring around my finger, trying to remember when I’d told you about “The Quiet World.”

After we’d chugged water and caught our breath and cooled down in front of your baby’s more-than-adequate air conditioning, I asked again. “How did you know? About the poem?”

“You told me when we met. You even recited it. It’s your favorite, right?”

It was the first poem I’d ever loved. It was my original sin, a snake hiding behind the serif type. You remembered.

“I’ll put _9 ¾_ on yours,” I said.

You laughed, grabbed my hand, and kissed my knuckles despite the sweat and dirt and bug spray. And you sang the only part of “Danny’s Song” that mattered: “ _Even though we ain’t got money/I’m so in love with you honey…”_

Right then, we could conquer anything.

 

Last night I put that picture of us over the mantle. The one Charlie took, that same overlook at Lower Purgatory, me and you just silhouettes holding hands while we look out over all that possibility. Most of the time these days, I can even look at pictures of you without the ground coming out from under me.

I didn’t sell the house, but Charlie begged me to come stay with her and Jess and I gave in -- I finally understand what you mean when you say living with lesbians is weird, but I can breathe here; being surrounded by Winchesters is healing in itself.

Sometimes we sit outside, the moon offering a desaturated view of the valley, smoking and talking about you. You’d be glad to know we laugh now.

But still, I put myself to bed each night with this prayer, all 32 ⅓ times:

_I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I_

**Author's Note:**

> [really elegant sharkfish](http://reallyelegantsharkfish.tumblr.com/) on tumblr
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _The Purgatory Natural Area is a real thing in San Marcos, Texas. The end of prohibition & ~~discrimination against gay couples~~ is not a real thing in Texas (yet)._
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel
> 
> In an effort to get people to look  
> into each other’s eyes more,  
> and also to appease the mutes,  
> the government has decided  
> to allot each person exactly one hundred  
> and sixty-seven words, per day.
> 
> When the phone rings, I put it to my ear  
> without saying hello. In the restaurant  
> I point at chicken noodle soup.  
> I am adjusting well to the new way.
> 
> Late at night, I call my long distance lover,  
> proudly say _I only used fifty-nine today._  
>  I saved the rest for you.
> 
> When she doesn’t respond,  
> I know she’s used up all her words,  
> so I slowly whisper _I love you_  
>  thirty-two and a third times.  
> After that, we just sit on the line  
> and listen to each other breathe.


End file.
